Cellular wireless communications are well known in the art. Many different standards and formats have been developed and implemented for enabling cellular wireless communications between cellular base stations and cellular handsets. For example, the advanced mobile phone service format (“AMPS”) was an initial analog format that was used to transmit data between a cellular base station and a cellular handset. The Global System for Mobile Communications (“GSM”) format is a digital format that uses a combination of time division multiple access (“TDMA”) and frequency division multiple access (“FDMA”) coding to transmit encoded data between a cellular base station and a cellular handset. Code division multiple access (“CDMA”) systems have also gained widespread acceptance for encoding data for transmission between a cellular base station and a cellular handset.
The large number of code and transmission formats that may be used for cellular communications has resulted in a number of different circuits that may be used to provide communication services from a cellular handset. Thus, cellular handsets are not interchangeable, and must be designed for use with one of the standardized formats for cellular data encoding and decoding. Although multi-rate phones are known in the art, such multi-rate phones suffer from various drawbacks. For example, one common drawback for multi-rate phones is that the multi-rate circuitry typically comprises redundant dual circuitry, such that both circuitries are active even though only one circuitry may be used at any given time. This configuration results in excess power consumption. Likewise, because dual sets of circuitry are used, it is necessary to construct the handset with hardware that will be idle and standing by for an unknown amount of use. This design constraint also results in a limit on the number of formats that can be processed by a given dual mode phone. For example, a dual mode phone typically would not be designed to be compatible with more than two common code and transmission formats, as this would result in a significant amount of excess equipment that would be idle at any given time.